By Name, Not Nature
by notevenifyoukillme
Summary: 'Heaven help the man who ever really loves you.' How thankful she was that Rhett had never been religious. Without Rhett just as she realised that she needed him, Scarlett was determined. She would have him back. How she had missed a challenge.


Hi! I'm new to Gone With the Wind fanfiction, and I've only just finished reading the book and its sequel Scarlett in the last few months. In short, I fell in love. This is my attempt to write a sequel to Gone With the Wind, and although the beginning scene here is similar to the one in Scarlett, the story will be very different. If you like what I've written and would like to read more, or if you see an error or believe that I could somehow improve, a review would be wonderful. They're what make me want to post here, and without them my muse tends to become lethargic.  
I hope you enjoy!

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Scarlett left the soggy grounds of the cemetery that now held the body of her dearest friend, Melanie Hamilton Wilkes, soaked by the rain that had suddenly tumbled down from above. She held her head high and walked alone from the graveyard with her shoulders squared. If the Old Guard didn't consider her feelings enough to console or speak to her, even to let her penetrate the crowd of mourners and console Ashley, knowing how close she and Melly had been, which she naturally assumed that they had to be, even if she hadn't, well, then she wouldn't dignify their presence by letting them see the tears that she would save for later when her only companion would be a bottle of brandy.

She chided herself for being so unladylike; Ellen O'Hara would never have condoned Scarlett drowning her sorrows with a man's liquor, and she felt a pang of guilt. Some of the lessons that Ellen and Mammy had so relentlessly bored into her, the lessons that never fully eclipsed the hot-headed and tempestuous nature that she had inherited from her father, Gerald O'Hara, had sprung once again into her conscience with the death of Melly, most likely because of the similar nature between her mother and her best friend. Lessons and habits that she believed belonged strictly to times before the war were all of a sudden making themselves known to her as she performed everyday tasks that had previously been without thought. She was more inclined to reach for her Sherry instead of her whiskey, more reluctant to leave the house unaccompanied and for the first time in a much longer time than she cared to think about, she attended a mass and confessed her sins to a face hidden behind gauze in a confessional box.

The second of these qualms may have been more because of the unhappy end to her second husband and the father to her daughter Ella, Frank Kennedy, who had taken a bullet to the head seeking revenge upon a negro and a white man who had all but violated her and tried to rob her. For a second she concerned herself with the thought that, should the same instance occur once more, more men's lives may be put in jeopardy, and this added to a rising assurance that she should never again leave the house without accompaniment. But before this thought had rested long in her mind, she realised that Rhett would laugh at her hard-headed idiocy and tell any who asked that she had deserved what she had gotten, rather than seek any sort of vengeance as her previous husband had.

Rhett. A husband by name, but not by nature. Oh, how she hated the man for leaving her! How she hated all men!

'They accept your shortcomings and unnecessary meanness for as long as they can endure, giving exactly as they receive and never even indicating that they might want something different, but when you tell them what they say they wanted to hear all along, they get out as fast as they can. What good are they? Looking happiness right in the face and turning away! Fickle and pig-headed and arrogant, the lot of them!' she thought hotly.

But she knew that this was unfair of her. She recalled many of the cruel things she had said to him and knowing that they had, in actuality, bore some weight on his heart, they took on a different meaning in her mind and conscience. His caprice was suddenly what he had more or less admitted what it had been - a shield for every cruel thing that she said. She hurt the people that loved her and never had she been more keenly aware of it. She blamed him not, for acting as he did. Hadn't she once thought of what merry sport it would have been to harvest his heart and dangle it in front of him in the most excruciating way possible as punishment for his not making his preference for her apparent? Yes, she had, and of course Rhett had known that she had been thinking it, as he had always known what she had been thinking. Very little had changed there, she doubted that it ever would.

But oh, how things had changed otherwise! Without the silhouette of Ashley Wilkes to blind her from what she truly felt in her heart, she longed for Rhett in a way that she never had before. She longed for him even dissimilarly to the way that she had longed for Ashley, because she had never felt the sinfully passionate desires she felt for Rhett for Ashley. She had longed to marry Ashley, which her insensible mind had promised her would lead to marital bliss that would allow her to eventually know him. In short, she had been a fool. For a woman so apt in manners of business, she was excessively inadequate in matters relating to the human heart. She had known that Ashley loved her, and that had sated her need. He had always been an enigma to her, and she had expected to marry him first and understand him later.

This was a bold contrast to the way she yearned for Rhett, for now she yearned for something she knew, something truly alike. Much as he had told her that only like and like could ensure happiness in marriage, she now felt that like and like were the only two that had a real ability to deprive each other. With Ashley's rejection she lost a dream, with Rhett's she had lost a part of herself and a painful and comparatively empty reality now existed. She had lost a corporeal, swarthy part of herself that told her frankly what she needed to hear any sometimes what she didn't. A part of her that did what needed to be done to protect, never telling, hiding behind insults and airs of indifference to keep her in check. He was a part of her mind and a part of her heart, and sometimes she hated him for it with the purest anger that only a scorned lover can nurse without physical injury. She yearned for his mind, his soul, she yearned for the jibes and anecdotes and snarky comments that she felt she could now bear without a sharp tongue or a shining fury that had been almost perpetually present in her eyes, knowing that he truly loved her.

She stepped into her carriage with the help of her coachman, Elias.

"Wheya to Miz Scahlet?" he asked, climbing up to the front and taking the whip in his hand.

Scarlett shook out the umbrella that she had completely forgotten to raise above her head during Melly's service, not concerning herself with the splatters of water that splashed on her dress and face. She sucked in a breath, closing her eyes tightly. If anyone had looked in at that moment, she would have looked as though she was holding her breath as if to withhold a belch, but the truth of the matter was that she needed to wait until she was at home to mourn for Melly, so she closed her eyes and stifled a sob, forcing her tears and her pain back down once more. The sky was doing enough crying for the both of them at that moment, her tears could wait.

"Take me home, Elias," she said, the picture in her mind and the place that Elias was headed completely different.


End file.
